As he had expected, his best friend, Billy Hake, was at the soda fountain, sitting on a stool and drinking a mild hallucinogen known as an LSD frappé.
“How’s the morn, Sorn?” Hake asked, in the slang popular at that time.
“Soft and mazy, Esterhazy,” Marvin replied, giving the obligatory response.
“Du koomen ta de la klipje?” Billy asked. (Pidgin Spanish-Afrikaans dialect was the new laugh sensation that year.)
“Ja, Mijnheer,” Marvin answered, a little heavily. His heart simply was not in the clever repartee.
Billy caught the nuance of dissatisfaction. He raised a quizzical eyebrow, folded his copy of James Joyce Comics, popped a Keen-Smoke into his mouth, bit down to release the fragrant green vapor, and asked, “For-why you burrow?”
The question was wryly phrased but obviously well intended.
Marvin sat down beside Billy. Heavyhearted, yet unwilling to reveal his unhappiness to his lighthearted friend, he held up both hands and proceeded to speak in Plains Indian Sign Language. (Many intellectually inclined young men were still under the influence of last year’s sensational Projectoscope production of Dakota Dialogue, starring Bjorn Rakradish as Crazy Horse and Milovar Slavovivowitz as Red Cloud, and done entirely in gesture.)
Marvin made the gestures, mocking yet serious, for heart-that-breaks, horse-that-wanders, sun-that-will-not-shine, moon-that-cannot-rise.
He was interrupted by Mr Bigelow, proprietor of the Stanhope Pharmacy. Mr Bigelow was a middle-aged man of seventy-four, slightly balding, with a small but evident paunch. Yet he affected boys’ ways. Now he said to Marvin. “Eh, Mijnheer, querenzie tomar la klopje inmensa de la cabeza vefrouvens in forma de ein skoboldash sundae?”
It was typical of Mr Bigelow and others of his generation to overdo the youthful slang, thus losing any comic effect except the pathetically unintentional.
“Schnell,” Marvin said, putting him down with the thoughtless cruelty of youth.
“Well, I never,” said Mr Bigelow, and moved huffily away with the mincing step he had learned from the Imitation of Life show.

I am an Afrikaans writer. I write in a language that is Dutch but not Dutch, European but not European, African but not African — even though it is the only language named after this (or any other) continent. I write in a language that has little to do with tulips, windmills, or silly snowmen with carrot noses, a language honed to denote Africa in all its harshness, cruelty, and beauty. “Aardvark”, “veld”, and “wildebeest” — these are the words that Afrikaans has given to the world. As is “trek”, of course: to migrate, to get going, to yield to the fever of the horizon. Yes, in the language of the Enterprise, to boldly go where no man has gone before.

I write in Afrikaans, a language of wanderers and migrants, of “trekkers”, who trekked rather than submit to British rule, who trekked again when the British occupied Natal in turn, who kept on doggedly trekking as the Free State and Transvaal and all the other dreams fell to the juggernaut of Empire.

And finally, just when the smoke of war was clearing, just when it seemed that things were finally looking up, just when it seemed that there would be no need of further trekking, these migrants, these god-fearing people who had given the world “Boer” and “spoor” and “commando” and “puff-adder”, embarked on their final and most ambitious journey. Inventing the word “apartheid”, they proceeded to trek away from sanity and even from reality itself.

And this thing, this big A, this abomination that strung barbed wire between us and the only country we ever knew or loved, has made migrants of us all.

How can we forget the freedom fighters, forced into exile or into that other kind of exile from which there can be no return? How can we forget the men and women who had to flee to fight another day, or the activists, harried by the security police (whose tactics were of course always extremely interesting)? And how could we forget the writers who had to abandon everything to escape persecution or hardship or any hint of kinship with these bastards who were turning the country into a parody of all they had ever dreamed of or believed?

But we shouldn’t forget the silent majority either, those who stayed behind, those who suffered in a country that was becoming more and more like a foreign country every day. They were the migrant workers with their passes designating them as temporary sojourners in the country of their birth. They were the vagrants and the dispossessed, but also those who retreated into a kind of inner exile, a moral stupor where the sky was still as blue as it was on TV, where the doves sang exclusively in verse, never mentioning the shacks and the barricades or the obscene whirring of rubber bullets.

There were the English too, lest we forget, who had had the savvy not to give their policies a name and were now torn between memories of Home and this strange new republic which they supported as eagerly as anyone else who was allowed to draw their crosses — though this has become an inconvenient truth of late, a kind of non-fact, something that will hopefully go away if no one mentions it again.

And always there were the cruel and haunted Afrikaners, the beautiful, deluded Afrikaners, these men and women who came up with names like “meerkat” and “boomslang” and “berg”, but loved this country more than words could express and still managed to turn it into a stranger.